Page 695 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 5 July 1989
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Mr Speaker, I have three minutes in which to speak to this issue. The standing orders are a fundamental code of this house in relation to business, conduct and procedure. The purpose of moving this referral motion from the Rally was merely to indicate our interest in the standing orders and the need for them to be reviewed, as has been clearly predicated by all of the comments in this chamber from time to time.
Mr Speaker, I make the following few observations. If one looks at the Hansard of the Senate of 1903, one sees that the Senate did not adopt the House of Commons rules which have flowed down through the House of Representatives here and across to us, through section 24 of our establishment Act.
There may be reasons why the Senate did not adopt that, but what occurs to the Rally is that the primary objective of standing orders in the House of Representatives and the House of Commons is to get legislation through in circumstances in which there is a majority rule in the house. The Senate, on the other hand, tends to have often minority groupings, and there are balances and checks on powers. The standing orders are significantly different in certain situations.
We would like the standing committee to look at that aspect, to see what can be gleaned from the Senate standing orders, to determine whether we have gone through all of the procedures and to determine whether, prior to self-government and during the long, long waiting period, the Senate contributed, as one hopes it did - but then the record will tell - to the establishment of standing orders in this chamber.
It is probably an appropriate time for me to mention, Mr Speaker, that prior to the declaration of the poll those certainties amongst us had the very great advantage of speaking to the Acting Clerk, Mr Piper, and the Acting Deputy Clerk, and we, of course, had some discussion about the standing orders. But at that stage it was an extremely complex set of words. Had the Rally not been engaged in other concerns and otherwise distracted and unable to determine who was to be elected further down its ticket, it would have put more time into the debating stage of the standing orders.
There are a number of issues, one of which we have corrected to date, which is to remove the signal power in a Minister to suspend standing orders. Mr Speaker, I commend an early examination by the standing committee of the standing orders that are currently used in this house.
MS FOLLETT (Chief Minister) (12.22): I am surprised to see on the notice paper this motion by Mr Collaery. I am surprised for a couple of reasons. First of all, on the Government side we have long accepted that the standing orders, as adopted in this Assembly, were an interim
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